London Cycles at The Museum of London

Tomorrow the Museum of London opens a new display called London Cycles. A celebration of cycling, the display examines how bikes allow us to move through the city.

The free display reflects on the act of cycling through the city from the 19th Century to today and presents some of the strides in digital collecting that the Museum of London is making. Born-digital objects are placed alongside other historical items and a new artistic commission to paint a fuller picture of the history of cycling and capture the zeitgeist of the two-wheeled movement that’s revolutionizing how we see London today.

One of the highlights of the display will focus on a ‘Boris’ bike that the Museum of London acquired for its collection, along with digital data about all of its journeys. Professor Jo Wood, a data-mapping expert and Professor of Visual Analytics at City University London, has since taken this data, along with other data from Transport for London, to create complex digital visualization that depicts the bikes various journeys around the capital.

London’s stations and parks become prominent as Wood gives the dots tails and fades out more unusual journeys in order to highlight key patterns of movement. The trail of the museum’s bike is shown in this on-screen animation in green, revealing where our bike was docked during its lifetime on London’s roads. Journeys between docking stations have been imagined as dots in a series of digital still animations.

London Cycles is a free display, and runs from 5 July – 22 September 2013

Laura is the Editor of the Locals, and started the site out of a love for writing and sharing stories from her local community to around the world.
Laura is often found camped out in a coffee shop, exploring back alleyways in foreign cities, or on one of her three bicycles.